Backburner
by Some Luck
Summary: This is a story about failure. Something the CSI team in Las Vegas rarely deals with. This is a flawed small town CSI's thoughts on the Las Vegas team, why they never fail, and why she does.


Authors note: I never started out to write this as fan fiction. Until a few weeks ago I didn't know what that was. I had heard it mentioned by a few of the obsessive Wapanese girls in my algebra class but I never really knew. I read a story by T. C. Boyle called "Heart of a Champion" and was planning it to be something like that.

I've decided that before I try to have this published I should get the opinion on this from the audience. So got nuts. Enjoy. Tell me what you think. I'm seventeen years old and this is my first story so I'm not sure how good it is compared to others. I'm not afraid of rejection and I do love praise.

This story is not a hate piece or a fantasy wish fulfillment thing or fanwank. The goal is not to offend or alienate any fans. Just know that all your favorite characters are not liked at all by the main character I've created. I've tried to create a character that is believable.

In the original versions I don't use the character names. Also Chandra was a real character on the show; she is from one of the episodes I got the idea for the story from an episode.

CSI is a great show and just so you know I think its one of the best on TV right now.

This story is copyrighted to me so if you want to put it on another website or something just contact me first. The answer will be yes, you just need to let me know.

Now for the story…

**Backburner**

She always dreaded the drive up to Las Vegas crime labs.

It was two solid hours on the road and then whole other hour of tourist traffic on the Strip. It was psychically and emotionally draining, considering all the paperwork she had back home, not to mention that she had nothing to look forward to once she got there.

She was a CSI not a courier. But the Las Vegas labs never seemed to understand that.

The second she drove off the exit ramp Karen began to feel self-conscious. Driving up in a ten year old white Honda Accord didn't make the greatest of impressions. Neither did the mismatching brown and gold doors retrieved from the scrap yard after a nasty crash. She stuck out like a sore thumb whenever she pulled into the parking lot.

The little Franken-Honda was dwarfed by the rows of new, shiny gunmetal grey and dark forest green Land Rovers, each emblazoned with the logo of the LVPD.

All that she and her partner Phillip had was a single police van that said Pahrump crime scene investigators on it.

Karen tried to tell herself that the men and women of the Las Vegas crime labs did not intimidate her. But even the words sounded hollow in her head. She knew it was a lie and she knew that for all intensive purposes they were better than her. They were better looking with better paychecks and were probably better at solving cases than she was.

Karen took out one of her daughter's scrunchies and put her brown hair in a loose pony tale. She did one final check in the rearview mirror before she went inside. Karen had long horse-like features, almond shaped eyes and a round face that was fast approaching age forty-five. She was not an unattractive woman, but by Las Vegas standards she was not an attractive woman.

It had been a few years since the Las Vegas Police Department had dropped the metro logo from their name but the rest of the building was pretty much the same since the last time she visited over a year ago. She had wanted to take the 64' Mustang that John had almost finished restoring, but he had needed it for the NAA meeting. He was at Paymon's Mediterranean Café for the NAA meeting and Karen wasn't going to stand in the way. John was always so proud and self-conscious about his work and wanted to have the car to impress his co-workers. She could have taken it but Karen decided it wasn't worth a late night screaming match.

Karen knew she better make the most of this trip. She was transferring in a month to Reno since John got the University job there. It was probably her last trip to the labs as a courier.

By the time she pulled into the parking lot she was about ready to have an epileptic seizure. It was dark outside, which meant it was a supernova on the New Strip. She still had impressions of the neon cowboy burned into her eyes.

Opening the car door gently, Karen was careful not to scratch the new Land Rovers. She didn't have the kind of money to fix something like that. As she popped the back trunk she looked down at the bumper and groaned.

John had added a new bumper sticker to the car. In addition to the Led Zeppelin sticker, the Grateful Dead Gummi Bear thing, the Aquabats sticker and the silver decal of the Darwin fish eating a Jesus fish with the witty slogan REALITY BITES, she now had an anti-Bush one. All of which asserted her husbands status as one of the hippie liberal democrats the right-wing conservatives were always complaining about. Karen didn't much care for politics.

The new edition to the bumper was a very uncouth slogan about the president (i.e. somewhere in Texas there is a village missing its idiot) right next to the purple frog holding up a peace sign. She wondered what possessed her to marry a man who put this much crap on his car.

Karen imagined John sneaking out in the morning, his lean frame bending over to slap it on her bumper. He was probably still wearing the same blue Hawaiian shirt he had been wearing yesterday. John reminded Karen of Jimmy Stewart in his later days, just when his black hair was just beginning to gray and his face was showing signs of age.

She couldn't help but feel like she was on an Ivy League college campus every time she walked on the grounds surrounding the Las Vegas labs. The landscaping out front was immaculate and had probably been featured on a HGTV special at one time or another. In art deco lettering the words Las Vegas Labs were printed above with the county seal, shining in all its spectacular glory, making her brick office building back in Pahrump look like a dive. The fact that her office was across from a 24-hour Denny's only added to her shame.

The labs were, in a word, modern, like stepping into a bright and happy not-so-distant future.

A black man walked out the sliding glass door and for a moment Karen could have sworn she was back on Misti Lang's Stud Farm taking samples for the joint sexual harassment suit. It hadn't been one of her fondest memories of work but all the guys had been worth it. My God, it was the largest number of men she had seen with sex appeal outside a major metropolitan city. Why was that anyways? It was like some vast conspiracy that all the beautiful people had to move to the largest cities.

The black man looked like he belonged there. Karen didn't know him very well but she had seen him before. He was one of the audiovisual experts who often appeared in the court case sketches and crime seen coverage that showed on the Channel 10 local news.

He was a very handsome man with absolutely amazing blue eyes, as he walked past her smiled at her briefly while his partner brushed past her as if she wasn't there. His partner was a very serious looking cop who was on the heavy side. That one she knew. His name around the Pahrump police station was Hard-ass Brass. Karen called him by the honorary title of Captain Hard-Ass Brass.

He had a reputation of being one of the best for cleaning up departments and creating tight knit communities of officers. If you weren't one of his people then you didn't have a chance in hell of getting him to sign off on funding. His signature, or rather his referral meant that you could get almost anything. That was how highly all the bureaucracy thought of the Captain. She knew him well. He had denied equipment funding twice for the Pahrump field office.

It was ridiculous. Both she and Phillip were working all of Nye County and were seriously over extended.

While Captain Brass had pulled some strings for new Land Rovers, they were working off computers that would have been state of the art, in say, 1997. She was transferring to Reno in the fall, which meant Phillip would now be left alone working out of a cramped desk in the Pahrump sheriff's office with less funding then he had now. The state budget cuts had hit Pahrump hard…everywhere hard…everywhere that is but Las Vegas.

It was all about connections, she thought, none of which she had. The obscene amounts of money that flowed in from gambling and tourism didn't hurt either. Captain Brass had the politicians of Sin city in his pocket and there was nothing Karen could do about that.

Phillip had tried to appeal to a judge many times for a bigger budget but it hadn't worked out.

Earlier that year Karen had heard about a kidnapping case involving the Las Vegas CSI team. A CSI from the Las Vegas lab named Stokes had been taken hostage and then later rescued. She had heard from a cop who was working on the case that the kidnapper had wanted a million dollars in cash for the return of the agent. In the real world they wouldn't have let the field agent go out unattended but in Second Chance city they got the million dollars from an "anonymous donor." The money had subsequently and mysteriously disappeared.

Karen knew exactly what that meant. The Captain had called in a few favors, probably from a judge or a senator and gotten the money for his man.

She walked inside with box in hand, ready to navigate the post-modern maze of the office and labs. It would have been easier to go to Los Angeles but the law required she stay with in state lines for evidence and navigate these tricky halls. The police station and interrogation rooms and coroners office were all in the same location. It was supposed to be more convenient but it wound up just being more confusing for her.

As she walked passed the waiting room Karen began to think about the first time she had visited the labs four years ago. She had met a very strange man in the waiting room, which was often reserved for grieving parents or nervous companions of suspects.

He was CSI, much higher in rank than her. He was a simple field officer they had saddled with lab work.

He was the leader of the Miami-Dade county team, which seemed like they were getting an explosion or a major drug bust every other week. All the thrill seekers in forensic sciences went for that one.

Rumor had it they saw more action than the vice squad. They had the reputation of being the most dangerous forensics job in America. The guy, Horace or something, had listened for short time while Karen had tried to make idle conversation.

Halfway through the conversation he had stood up and had said in a bizarrely sage-like way "imperfection is nine tenths of a flaw," and left her to contemplate his words of wisdom.

She mulled it over for the remainder of her time but she couldn't come close to understanding what he meant. She thought at first it was a saying or she had never heard before but even that didn't make sense. Nine tenths of a flaw-- What the fuck does that even mean? Karen thought angrily. It was only later that she learned that he always made the sage-like quips, loving to think that he was some brash crusader with a brilliant sense of wit.

She walked down the hallway to Gregory's new office in order to make the transfer. She walked passed other offices and workstations were CSIs of various rank were diligently working to solve the top cases of the day. It was no use going into any of their offices they were all too busy or would just give her some impassioned speech about how they would do everything in their power to make sure that Karen's samples were analyzed and then banish the cases to the back piles.

She walked straight ahead, through the narrow hallways of the labs, reminding herself she was doing this for Carol.

When she walked passed one of the testing areas she had to stop. Inside Grissom was hunched over a table reassembling what looked like—no---what was a gumball machine.

Karen had talked to Grissom on her first trip to the Labs. Grissom was the head honcho and had promised Karen's that her cases would get the kind of equal attention that his current cases received. It had all been lies of course. The man hadn't done a damn thing.

A pretty woman with dark hair and wearing clothes that cost one week's worth of Karen's salary, was looking over Grissom's shoulder and watched as he put the various pieces together.

Her nickname around the police station in Pahrump was High-heels. Karen didn't know the woman's real name but got a sense of satisfaction out of calling her by the nickname the police officers had given her. Every time the police officers had seen her on a crime scene she was wearing high heels. This was a strange and highly inappropriate for the type of work the woman did. Sneakers or boots would have been more practical but the woman was from Las Vegas and was anything but practical.

The officers talked a lot about the office romances that supposedly went on at the Las Vegas labs. Some were convinced High-heels had a daddy complex and secretly loved Grissom. While other officers said it was the blonde blood splatter expert he had the hots for and yet still a few brave ones ventured to say it was one of the men on the team who really had Grissom's eye.

Karen wondered if any of them knew how many people at the Pahrump police station talked about them. They might get a kick out of knowing they were a staple of water cooler gossip.

She loathed the self-righteous prick that was Grissom. He was the one man who would have his whole team work tirelessly to solve a few high profile murders but didn't have the time for fifty-five rapes, murders, and assaults she had collected since last June. Most were all still in the boxes, collecting dust, or in the process of being transferred out of state labs.

The last time she had gone to talk to him was about two years ago and he had been unavailable. The ballistics expert they had transferred her to said he was at a bug convention racing roaches. It was about the Ursula Vergas case. They had been too slow and two women had paid the price.

Fucking hypocrites.

It was at that point she had just given up on trying to reach him altogether if they went to such absurd lengths to keep her from reaching the man. For a man who was much smarter than Karen she would think he could come up with a better excuse.

For a moment Karen thought about banging on the glass and screaming out Grissom's name and yelling at him for all the things he had hadn't done. She wanted to tell him what a hypocrite he was for not accepting her cases. A little of his time was all she had asked for.

If he had only transferred one of his people to her to help lighten the workload, it would have been enough. But he never had. He had insisted that she or Phillip bring everything the Pahrump lab wasn't equipped for to him. Karen wanted to ask him if he had ever had to tell a grieving parent or rape victim that they had to wait six weeks for a through investigation when the top lab in the country was right next door and could probably do it in 3 days.

She found that another now occupied Gregory's office, also known as the Bio-level 2 lab. It was a harried woman wearing a lab coat that didn't look like she had too much time on her hands. Karen kicked herself mentally. Of course he wouldn't still be here with the promotion. She had first heard at the reunion in May. Gregory was an old family friend. Karen's older Susan was married to Gregory's cousin Harold.

They had hit it off together and it had been refreshing to have something to talk about at the reunions. They had been friends on the side, occasionally doing stuff together, but mostly getting updates on each other through the family and her mother's weekly calls.

He had been pulling favors for her when she moved from El Paso to Nevada for the job but that was before the fieldwork promotion.

Now Gregory only had a few moments to look at stuff before and not even that anymore since he had moved up in the world. She had lost her best contact in the forensics department.

At times like this she wondered if she should just give up and go back to El Paso. Take that teaching job the University of Texas branch there, and pretend that she didn't fail. $44,000 dollars didn't pay for much. It would be more. It would be something.

"Can I help you?" said the woman not bothering to look up from a stack of folders. Before Karen could reply her response came. "Because if I can't I really don't have the time every five minutes someone comes in with a new pile of evidence that is top propriety for me to analyze and I am behind as it is."

"Hey, I got something for you" said the blonde blood spatter expert as she walked in. She walked as though she were walking right off the runway. Rumor had it she was once a stripper.

Karen, who was wearing a pair of worn out blue Keds, torn jeans, a dirty I love NY t-shirt and a red flannel, wished she could have crawled into a hole and died right there. The woman wasn't dressing for a workday; she was dressed for a runway. She was dressing to kill. Maybe the woman was hoping the new lab girl was a lesbian and that her look would help speed up the process.

"Make it you're priority. Thanks. Remember Gregory mentioned to you that my stuff gets done first." She flashed an academy award-winning smile and was out the door before the girl had a chance to say a word in edgewise.

The woman hadn't even noticed Karen.

"Right on cue. As I said, it's been like this all day, every five minuets." She sighed and made eye contact with Karen for the first time.

"What's your name?" said Karen.

"Chandra. Why?"

"I'm Karen Meier. I came up with a box of cases and I was wondering if Gregory is here?"

"No he's is not here. I am overwhelmed with work and if you cant help me with it then don't waste my time."

That is when Karen lost it.

"Don't talk to me like that. You think this is bad. You go outside this safe little city; it gets a hell of a lot worse. Time is running out I have in here twenty-nine cases that are lab doesn't have the budget for. You know what its like. In the real world people die and sometimes there is nothing you can do for them. Our budget is shot and it's getting worse. We have nothing."

"Where are you from?"

Chandra was speechless. "Uhh….Naugatuck, Connecticut."

"This ain't Naugatuck anymore. You have just left the real world behind and you have just entered into a nightmare. Everyday of your life you will wake up and come to work with people smiling and making small talk and that Audio Visual guy might even offer you a date. And some kid will come in here one day and offer you a picture of you saving the day. You will feel good about yourself for catching the bad guys. But if I were you I would go back to Connecticut or wherever the hell you came from."

Karen gave a pause and then added, "You know why?"

"Because you see this box…well more of these are going to come and they are going to be filled with evidence that is hard to analyze. These boxes will be filled with sad cases that often times can't be solved and others with pictures of ugly people and gruesome things that you don't want to see. And you know what they are going to do with that box? They are going to ask you not to waste your time with it. They are going to put it away and these boxes will never see the light of day again. How do you think they keep the title of best labs in the country? They don't waste their time on anything we send them. Were always on the backburner and I can't do it anymore. How do I know all this? Well, Sandra, I'm the one that brings these boxes in."

Karen opened the box and handed her the single file of Angela Pharr with the evidence baggies of swabs. Sandra opened the report and closed it. Giving Karen a timid look of sympathy she said.

"I can't do this. I have too much on my plate and it doesn't have the proper eye witness testimony description to warrant a transfer to this lab. There's not enough here to analyze in the first place. I'm sorry."

"I know" was all Karen said.

She left the lab assistant in a stunned silence staring at the contents of the box.

"What the hell am I going to tell Carol Pharr? That the second best lab in the nation doesn't have the time to look at a simple rape kit because I don't have the eye witness, she slit her fucking throat, and you say I need the eye witness testimony! You know how unreliable and irreverent eye witness testimony is in the first place."

She wanted to scream all of that to Grissom as she walked by but she said nothing.

She drove home in silence with here only company being Angela's files and kit, which resided like the ghost of a person, sitting next to her, staring at her accusingly with invisible eyes.

The victim had been Angela Pharr, a 26-year-old unwed mother from Amargosa Valley. She was a blackjack dealer at the Pahrump nugget and had been planning on going to the University of Nevada for a degree in nursing.

Karen had seen her once or twice in her yoga class at the YMCA. Angela had said it was her only time alone. She was such a sweet girl that had been abandoned by men far too much in her life. She had a cheerful round face, blonde, an average body, and sweet blue eyes.

All of which she had filed under the comment box in the review of the coroners reports.

She wished the man had killed her and dumped her in Death Valley or done something sensational. Then she might have been able to get more of an interest in the case. But since she had been left in her bedroom crying there was little anyone could do. They had done the rape kit and SAE for the fluids on the bed sheets.

The breaking and entering had turned up nothing. It was hardly a breaking and entering. The man had walked in the open backdoor. He left no fingerprints and the shoeprints led nowhere. Not even a partial. There was no way they could even put the bastard in AFIS.

Her mother had convinced her to fill out a police report. Phillip had taken the samples a day after the attack. It wasn't as accurate but it might be an enough to get a match in the databanks.

She only lasted a week. She didn't eat or talk or sleep for three days. By Friday Angela had given up on herself. On Sunday she had committed suicide by slitting her throat with a stainless steal kitchen knife. Angela hadn't been as strong a person as everyone had thought. Her mother had known though, what a fragile soul she was. The attack and her obituary were footnotes in the local newspapers.

Her mother was Carol Pharr, a sweet forty-five year old woman with bleached blonde hair who worked the perfume counter at JcPenney in the mall. Carol was the type of person whom you forgot five minuets after meeting her.

All the locals that cared enough to comment on the gossip called her suicide weak and selfish. All of them had thought Angela would have been better than that. She left her mother with a child to support. All her co-workers and her college friends were all devastated. But most of the townsfolk didn't know about Angela's death.

The big local story had been corruption in the OCRWM office. A single rape-suicide could hold it's own against the embezzlement scandals in the Yucca Mountain program. It was ironic because no one normally gave a shit about what went on in the Civilian Radioactive Waste management offices. Most people didn't even know what they did!

The department would scrape together the funding to send it to the Lawrence Livermore labs but it probably wouldn't turn up in the system. She had a feeling they were dealing with a man who had gotten away before. Carol Pharr would probably never anything about the man who hurt her daughter other than that he wore a John Deere hat and smelled like a cheap malt liquor.

Why did the girl have to be named Angela?

Angela wasn't any Angel.

She wasn't the most extraordinary person. She was the happy, prima Madonna gossiping girly girl kind of woman you see all the time. You could throw a rock and hit a hundred million more like Angela.

She rarely admitted her problems; it had always been someone else's fault. In high school she had been a heavy stoner and drinker and was kicked out of the house many times.

Now she had killed herself and left her mother heartbroken to raise her grandchild all by herself.

To Karen she was an empty yoga mat. She was a missing fixture from the video store counter where she hung out and rented DVDs for her son Caleb. She was missing from the sidelines of soccer practice cheering on Caleb. She was the only parent that ever stood up and cheered even if her son didn't make the goal.

It was just another sign of failure and Karen knew there was nothing she could do.

Karen wished she worked in Las Vegas. They never seemed to lose. Unlike the rest of the world. It was unreal. It wasn't fair.

She drove back home and collapsed on the couch and turned on some mind numbing television program about Civil War reenactments until John came home with the kids.

She ordered her daughter and her son's favorites from the Thai place and they all sat around like a family. She talked about her day and found herself nearly crying half way through the Pad Thai when she said Angela's name.

Alexis and Jason were wonderful. They tried to comfort her as best they could. They were such wonderful kids. They never really fought like she had with her siblings.

All dead men, women and children from the cases she had in the boxes seemed to flash before her eyes and she just sat in silence as her husband ranted about how he didn't want her to go up to Las Vegas because it always caused her so much stress.

Later that month she transferred to Reno and her husband began to work for the University in the teaching job he had always wanted.

The transfer to Reno had been seamless. She was thankful she didn't have anymore of the local yokels or cowboys or Las Vegas trips to deal with. Reno also had a much lighter load of uncertain suicides.

Alexis had protested the move like most teenage girls did, giving them the silent treatment, but then she had quickly forgotten it once a boy had asked her out. Sometimes she still saw Angela's dead eyes in Alexis.

But then she would blink and they would be gone.

She learned a few days later from her mother that Gregory's replacement Chandra Moore had quit the first day and went back for a job in Waterbury.

It was the same day the results came back from the Lawrence Livermore labs. The DNA results were inconclusive there wasn't enough to isolate a potential suspect since the person wasn't on file anywhere.

They never found the man who raped Angela Pharr.

The Las Vegas CSI team has the highest success rate in the nation, second only to the New York City and Miami-Dade County CSI teams.

No one ever notices the unopened boxes left in the LVPD police storage block.


End file.
